US authorities were closely tracking a Chinese airship that was spotted flying over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana this week. The suspected spy balloon was shot down along the coast of the Carolinas on Saturday.
Chinese officials shared “regret” on Friday and claimed the balloon was conducting meteorological research and had been accidentally blown off course by winds.
A Pentagon official called the air balloon “a clear violation of US sovereignty” at a press briefing on Friday and and dismissed China’s claims that it is not a spy ship.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken called off a planned trip to Beijing this weekend as the diplomatic stand-off intensified.
The Pentagon initially resisted calls from Republican lawmakers to shoot the “intelligence gathering” airship down. President Joe Biden later gave the green light for the operation to go ahead on Saturday.
Reports broke early afternoon on Saturday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had issued a ground stop affecting three airports in North and South Carolina as the balloon drifted through its airspace.
Four US officials said, at the time, that the plan was to bring it down over the ocean to recover remnants of the balloon, the Associated Press reported.
President Joe Biden said later on Saturday afternoon that he “ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible”.
What we knew about the airship’s flight path
A Pentagon official said during a briefing on Thursday that the balloon, which was roughly the size of three large buses, was first sighted over the Aleutian Islands earlier this week.
The archipelago of about 300 islands is located between Alaska and Russia and borders the northern edge of the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea.
The airship then travelled over northern Canada at an altitude well above commercial air traffic, officials said.
The balloon then headed south, and was sighted over the skies of Montana around the city of Billings.
Ashley McGowan, who lives in Reed Point, about 60 miles west of Billings, told CNN she saw a bright white dot in the sky on Wednesday.
Ms McGowan said she initially wondered if it might be a UFO, space junk or a comet. She said there were US Air Force jets “flying everywhere” around the airship.
Billings is roughly 200 miles southeast of Malmstrom Air Force Base, where the US has 150 nuclear warheads across its 13,800-square-mile complex.
The Pentagon reportedly scrambled fighter jets, including F-22s, to potentially shoot down the balloon if ordered to by the White House.
However, the White House initially decided against the escalatory move over concerns that the debris could injure or kill residents on the ground.
At a press briefing at midday on Friday, Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder said the balloon was currently over the centre of the continental United States.
Pressed for further details, he refused to say precisely where the ballon was: “The public certainly has the ability to look up in the sky and see where the balloon is.”
He said it was travelling eastwards at an altitude of 60,000 feet, and that the US was continuing to monitor its options.
During the briefing, Brig Gen Ryder was asked whether the airship had travelled over Japan.
The Pentagon official acknowledged he had seen press reports that it had been in Japanese air space.
“As we acknowledged in our statement that we posted last night we have seen this type of balloon activity elsewhere,” he said.
There were reports on social media that a balloon matching the description of the one sighted over Montana had been seen in the skies above Japan in 2020.
At about 12.30pm on Friday, the National Weather Service’s Kansas City office tweeted that it received reports of a large balloon in the skies above Missouri.
It confirmed the balloon did not belong to the weather service, and said it was moving in a southeast direction.
The crew of a private jet reported seeing a “derelict balloon adrift” in a notification to the Federal Aviation Administration at about 11.30am on Friday.
The Cessna Citation jet was flying at an altitude of 43,000 feet when it spotted the balloon about 20 miles north of Kansas City International Airport travelling at about 50,000 feet.
Residents in St Louis, Missouri, reported more possible sightings of the Chinese surveillance balloon on Friday afternoon.
In a statement on Thursday night, Brig Gen Ryder said the US Government “has detected and is tracking a high altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now”.
Canada’s national defence department said it had also detected the balloon and was “monitoring a potential second incident”.
During Friday’s briefing, a Pentagon official said the airship had flown close to “a number of sensitive sites”. The official said the US was taking steps to mitigate any foreign intelligence risk.
The surveillance balloon had previously been spotted over Guam and Hawaii, US officials said.
How it got taken down
After restricting the airspace along the coast of North and South Carolina, the US military shot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon.
The Associated Press reported that President Joe Biden gave the green light to shoot the balloon down, hours after announcing that he was going to “deal with” the situation.
Mr Biden added that military leaders chose to wait until the balloon was above water as it was “the safest place to do it”. There is currently an ongoing effort to recover the balloon’s debris.
